Ruth Asawa’s Technique has a Name, Here’s Why We Should Care

There’s a Problem with How Museums Talk about Craft

Museums honor the techniques and materials used when it comes to paintings and sculptures. They do this by including the information on the label, they tell us this painting is by Mary Cassatt, an American painter, that it’s an oil painting on canvas. The label will also tell us what year the painting was made and her birth and death years.

When it comes to work from traditional craft forms, shown in museums, the technique, and sometimes also materials, are glossed over. A weaving might just be called “a weaving” when I’d like to know what kind of weaving. Is it twill? or overshot? Was it hand woven by the artist? Was it made on a jacquard loom, based on a design by the makers, or someone else?

I always, always want more information about how the item was made, what it’s made out of, and by whom.

I often don’t get this information, and where I really don’t get it, is in museum shows, books and articles about Ruth Asawa. People, writers, publications and museums have called her technique variously, crochet, knitting, weaving and basket weaving. All of these are very frustrating because these are all wonderful crafts in their own right, with rich histories. And words mean things. Weaving means threads or yarns, one set of threads perpendicular and the other going horizontally, between those threads.

And if you know even a little bit about basket weaving, or knitting or crochet, if you’ve even seen items made with those methods, you can tell by looking at Ruth Asawa’s wire sculptures, that they are not those things.

Craft matters. Methods and materials matter. The words we use are important. And publications and museums have a duty of care to educate the public about methods and materials.

There’s a line you’ll read about Ruth Asawa and her wire sculpture technique – it’s a sentence that in nearly every article – that she visited Mexico, where a Mexican basketmaker taught her the method she then used in her sculptures.

The lack of detail bothered me. Why was this basket making technique of Mexico never named? Why was this one, same sentence repeated, over and over, without any additional detail? It felt like part of her mythos, this trip to Mexico and who she met there.

A few years ago, I was researching Ruth Asawa, starting out so I could write a short blog post for kids. Then I did a deep dive on her life and method, reading all the books on her I could find, reading the entire transcript of an oral interview conducted with her and her husband late in her life. I got help from librarians in finding comprehensive tomes of Mexican basketry. I interviewed a basketmaker, who explained how basketmaking works and how Ruth Asawa’s work is not basketmaking.

I then wrote an epically long and well illustrated blog post, “Ruth Asawa and the Mythical Basketmaker of Mexico,” where I made points about how:

a) methods and materials matter and should be labeled correctly by museums.

b) Ruth Asawa’s method is not basket making.

(and some other things, I haven’t re-read it in a while.)

Then, there were some insightful comments from readers of that post and I revised my thinking in the comments, but didn’t manage to re-write the blog post, because I couldn’t figure out how to revamp it.

That blog post gets a strange amount of traffic via Pinterest – strange because the image I chose for my Pinterest post is a black and white line drawing – not very Pinterest-worthy.

Someone saw it and forwarded it to an expert who guess what – knows exactly what the method is, and whose cultural heritage it is.

The expert in question is Jan Bell, formerly Curator of Collections at the Arizona State Museum. She wrote an amazing article about the technique, which is called looping, or simple looping, in an article in the 1988 issue of American Indian Art Magazine. She kindly sent me a copy of her article, which is where I learned that:

• the method Ruth Asawa used is called looping, or simple looping (commenters and I had also come to this conclusion, but we were unable to link it to a specific group of people.)

• It has been practiced by the indigenous people called Tohono O’Odham, (and others) of Arizona and Mexico, for centuries. In the 1940s, members of the tribe started making looped baskets, primarily for home use, out of baling wire. Baling wire is the wire used to hold bales of hay together. Author Jan Bell describes the process of annealing and straightening the wire for use, as well as the method for making the baskets.

She personally collected (purchased) baskets from the makers and interviewed them about their methods and family histories of making.  The makers of the baskets pictured in the article are named.

Ruth Asawa grew up on a farm in California, before being sent, along with her entire family, to internment camps during WWII. She wrote about using whatever bits of material she could find in rural North Carolina, where she attended Black Mountain College. One of those materials was steel wire.  This is a material she would have already known about, and she was working on the college’s farm.

What I was wrong about in my previous blog post:

• I said that Ruth Asawa clearly met someone in Mexico, but that that person was not a basket weaver, because her method was not basket weaving.

Okay, so I was wrong about that. Looping is a basket making method, just not the usual kind where there’s some sort of woven structure. I think I also said that baskets where not usually made out of metal. Wrong again! See above, where indigenous folks started using baling wire in about the 1940s, and continuing until at least the 1980s.

• The standard story is that Asawa met “a Mexican basket weaver,” and the truth is that she must have met an indigenous person, making baskets using the looping, or simple looping method. The indigenous maker was likely a member of the Tohono O’Odham tribe.  Isn’t that better?  To have more detail, and to credit people?

Why We Should Credit the People whose Cultural Heritage includes Looping

(Well, that’s a long heading.) Obviously, we should credit the people who came up with a thing, always. In particular, when those people are indigenous, it’s even more important to honor and be respectful, given, you know, all of modern history.

In art, we have this idea that “genius will out,” that no matter what, the (traditionally male) artist-genius, will spring forth, full formed, and his talent will be self-evident to all: “why, he’s so amazing, he doesn’t even need training!”

When in fact, natural talent is nice, and also, everyone gets better with training.

I wonder if pretending to not know where Ruth Asawa’s method came from fits in more with this idea of the singular genius?  Perhaps especially because of the mainstream art world’s desire to “elevate” craft techniques and pretend they’re not craft?

Why do art historians not know this term, looping? Why aren’t they looking for the correct term? I found it, and it only took years, making bold claims on the internet, and finally being corrected by someone who knew.

More about Tohono O’Odham People and their Baskets

According to the Arizona Memory Project, Tohono O’Odham means people of the desert, and they are from the Sonoran Desert, which stretches over Arizona and Northern Mexico.

If you have seen Tohono O’Odham baskets, you have probably see their more commonly made ones, that are made from plant fibers.  Those were made by women.  In contrast, the wire baskets were made by men.  Bell writes that Eugene Lopez “is most commonly associated with the craft by both Tohono O’Odham and Anglos…He is often credited with originating wire basket making.” (p. 49)

She says that sometimes thinner wire was used, including colorful, insulated wire.

While the focus of her article is on the Tohono O’Odham, she also mentions that “looped write baskets…are made and used among many of the native groups as well as mestizos in widespread areas of northwestern Mexico,” (p. 54)

Summary

In conclusion, we can name the method that Ruth Asawa used to make her wire sculptures, it’s called looping or simple looping.

In Arizona and Mexico, looping was used by the Tohono O’Odham tribe. She likely met an indigenous maker in Mexico in the 1940s, who may have been Tohono O’Odham.  (Dare I say, ‘was likely’?)

We have the regional origin location for Asawa’s method.

In addition, author Jan Bell points out that looping has been practiced all of the world and “has been referred to by a variety of names,” including knotless netting, coil-without-foundation, looping and lace coil.  In my previous blog post, I concluded that Asawa was using knotless netting, and commenters agreed, and also suggested “looping”

Often in academic specialties, people get so specialized that they don’t know what they don’t know, and connections between members of different academic disciplines isn’t great. That’s why sometimes great scientific leaps forward come from outsiders, who can better make connections and creative leaps.

I am one of those outsiders, and I am saying, hey art history folks, I’d like to introduce you to the folks over here, they know stuff you don’t know about how things were made.  Of course, the folks being published in American Indian Art Magazine are also art historians.

Now that you know, you can do better, art historians and museums. Now, go fix those labels.

Acknowledgements

Thank you so much to Jan Bell for writing to me, and sharing a copy of her article, “Tohono O’Odham Wire Baskets” published in “American Indian Art Magazine,” Volume 13 Number 4, Autumn 1988.

This essay is a non-profit, educational endeavor.  It was first published on ElaineLutherArt.com on September 9, 2026.

P.S.  This is not a criticism of Ruth Asawa.  Who she met and who taught her is unknown.  We are making guesses based on what we do know.  My critique is of art historians and museums, for being, in general, un-curious about women artists and anything that might be considered craft.  In one oral-history interview, late in life, Asawa said that her method was “crochet.”  We know that it objectively was not.  But I can understand using terms that most people can understand, even when we ourselves know they’re not totally accurate.

And perhaps if museums had taken more notice of her sooner, we would have more information.  The extensive documentation we do have is as a result of her long friendship with Imogen Cunningham, who photographed her extensively, and as a result of her own self-belief in her work.

This P.S. was written on 9/11/26 in response to a comment in a forum about this blog post.